subtextual
i don’t have much to say other than that this would’ve killed as a wmaf britishized legally blonde type story. instead it was boring and stupefyingly even more condescending than babel…..i understand the impetus to chew up imperialism/racism/empire into baby bird lessons for a specific audience, but WHO thought it would be a good idea to apply that sort of faux profundity on really basic easily wikipediable paradoxes everybody saw on 9gag in 2012. who is this for?? <oh no, he cast a spell> <i quickly vanquished it with the power of LOGIC and CALCULUS> was not a two step dance i thought rfk would ever build a book around but here we are.
i did like the bones of alice’s character: annoying, pretentious, neurotic, arrogant, suicidal, loves to delude and gaslight herself to the point of self sabotage. however her internalized misogyny, which i would’ve lapped the fuck up had alice been given a female rival love interest, weirdly just came off as a veneer for rfk’s own unexamined misogyny, which is becoming an odd pattern in her books. like her surface level interrogations of female relationships never actually go anywhere productive or interesting, female characters stop at being bitchy or slutty or a sycophant and not worthy of respect. like ohhhh my god that one scene where the female prof, upon hearing alice divulge her sexual assault, says something along the lines of, HAHA, you thought i would CARE? when i know you think of me as an OLD HAG? fool. BEGONE. no doubt that there are evil reprehensible women irl but when you keep flanderizing women’s wrongs while having alice rivals to loversly swoon over peter’s floppy hair it’s just hmmm. not a great look.
i hate it when authors invent beautiful, repressed, haughty female characters only to yoke them to a man, instead of psychosexually bouncing them off another female character and generating interesting tension wrt competition, women being pit against each other for male validation, women being self-destructive agents of misogyny, women being forced to sabotage or reluctantly conspire with each other to get ahead, women begrudgingly respecting each other, etcetera. basically, i think alice needed a vivian. if only rfk had a fraction of the visionary talent that amanda brown had….alas
i don’t have much to say other than that this would’ve killed as a wmaf britishized legally blonde type story. instead it was boring and stupefyingly even more condescending than babel…..i understand the impetus to chew up imperialism/racism/empire into baby bird lessons for a specific audience, but WHO thought it would be a good idea to apply that sort of faux profundity on really basic easily wikipediable paradoxes everybody saw on 9gag in 2012. who is this for?? <oh no, he cast a spell> <i quickly vanquished it with the power of LOGIC and CALCULUS> was not a two step dance i thought rfk would ever build a book around but here we are.
i did like the bones of alice’s character: annoying, pretentious, neurotic, arrogant, suicidal, loves to delude and gaslight herself to the point of self sabotage. however her internalized misogyny, which i would’ve lapped the fuck up had alice been given a female rival love interest, weirdly just came off as a veneer for rfk’s own unexamined misogyny, which is becoming an odd pattern in her books. like her surface level interrogations of female relationships never actually go anywhere productive or interesting, female characters stop at being bitchy or slutty or a sycophant and not worthy of respect. like ohhhh my god that one scene where the female prof, upon hearing alice divulge her sexual assault, says something along the lines of, HAHA, you thought i would CARE? when i know you think of me as an OLD HAG? fool. BEGONE. no doubt that there are evil reprehensible women irl but when you keep flanderizing women’s wrongs while having alice rivals to loversly swoon over peter’s floppy hair it’s just hmmm. not a great look.
i hate it when authors invent beautiful, repressed, haughty female characters only to yoke them to a man, instead of psychosexually bouncing them off another female character and generating interesting tension wrt competition, women being pit against each other for male validation, women being self-destructive agents of misogyny, women being forced to sabotage or reluctantly conspire with each other to get ahead, women begrudgingly respecting each other, etcetera. basically, i think alice needed a vivian. if only rfk had a fraction of the visionary talent that amanda brown had….alas